


The subtle grace of gravity

by glossary



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Isolation, Loneliness, Obsessive Behavior, Pseudo-Incest, Worship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 14:22:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3813757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glossary/pseuds/glossary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kalique thinks: <i>You’re all I know about loveliness</i>, and wonders if you can be born in love—if love is like a poisonous tree that spreads its branches inside your veins and lungs, if it squeezes your heart the way one might bite an apple (satisfied when it breaks).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The subtle grace of gravity

**Author's Note:**

> this is the original version of [all shall love and despair](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3469250), and you will notice immediately that, of course, it is absolutely nothing like it. because that's how creativity rolls.   
>  this is not an au, just set in a very distant future. updates will be slow, because that's how _i_ roll.

The world ends four days after Kalique’s fourteenth birthday.

The woman is already asleep by the time she reaches the room, which is stark in its simplicity: a high ceiling, constant illumination despite the lack of noticeable bulbs, and a single entrance without a door. Everything is white: the walls, the floor, the hovering bed where the woman rests, hands crossed daintily over her sternum. Kalique approaches slowly – it’s the first time she’s seen someone in stasis, and the rise and fall of the woman’s chest is so subtle that her heart goes cold for a second.

The woman is small, fine-boned and golden-skinned; her tanned skin is smooth like new snow. Summer could fall in love with flesh like this. Her gown, too, is white: pieces of fabric so sheer and delicate they look like tamed clouds, except for the thin blue ribbon tied just under her breasts. Her mouth is painted the same shade, as are her lids – midnight blue, unsullied. Kalique stares, inexpressive, for a long time.

The woman is barefoot. The tiny feet produces the strange impression of vulnerability – peculiar, Kalique reflects, how an act as simple as rest could soothe so much of the woman’s intensity, the way one might never suspect how sharp a sleeping beast’s teeth are.

She thinks: _this is love_ , and kisses those sleeping lips, tastes the blue lipstick – sticky like blueberry juice – inhales. It smells like the woman’s favourite spicy tea. It’s so irrevocably, heartbreakingly tied to her dearest memories that her longing explodes into a wild wanting, confused and aching, and her eyes fill with tears. They cling to her lashes like coins held in a fist, meant for a wishing well.

But Kalique does not cry. And she does not wish.

* * *

 The silence is probably the strangest thing.

They eat together, all three of them—Kalique looks at her siblings and has a hard time loving them, even though she supposes she must. The truth is she hardly knows them: Balem was already a millennium old when she was born, and five-year-old Titus lingers in her childhood memories as a bundle wrapped in their mother’s arms. She can recognise herself in them – something in the pleasing arch of their mouths – but there’s a sharp vulnerability underlining Balem’s beauty, and Titus’ sloe-eyed intensity is something pleasant, charming Kalique lacks.

Kalique thinks about saying something but that seems to require more strength that she’s got at the moment. The faint clink of china clicking together, the chime of the silver spoons, the slow throb of Kalique’s heart – are any of these things real? How can she be sure she isn’t turning into a hollow-boned doll? When she looks in the mirror a doe-eyed girl with the legs of a gazelle looks back – a girl who gives the appearance of being able to run from anything and that’s a lie because there is no running from this. Outside the stars shine bright and cold: they have always been there, and they will remain when Kalique is dust. It takes her a second to recognise the painful awareness of her own mortality.

One corner of her mouth quirks into a self-deprecating smile. It’s funny because as far as Kalique knows four humans are alive and she’s one of them.

She visits Mother often, not because it brings her any particular relief but because she doesn’t have anything better to do. Time stills, as if by entering the stasis room she goes back to the first day aboard the ship. White walls, white floor, white gown. The tips of Mother’s nails are painted a pale shade of pearl, and when Kalique lifts her hand to caress her own cheek in a parody of heartfelt affection, they gleam with an undertone of pink and lavender.

Kalique thinks: _You’re all I know about loveliness_ , and wonders if you can be born in love—if love is like a poisonous tree that spreads its branches inside your veins and lungs, if it squeezes your heart the way one might bite an apple (satisfied when it breaks). That sounds like more awfulness that even someone of her blood can bear – if you don’t have a choice how is it fair? Is this even her own melancholy or has the silence prodded spring into life and are these the flowers of her longing? She remembers a whole planet kneeling at the sight of her fluttering dress, remembers being called a goddess and knows this can’t be true because the ability to love like something that will burn until there is nothing left to destroy is a human quality, and Kalique Abraxas has it in spades.

* * *

There’s a cat.

This is surprising because animals aboard the ship are strictly controlled – they exist to provide food and leather for her siblings and herself. It’s black and tiny and it looks at Kalique the way her own mother does: a sort of placid neutrality. (Something must be wrong with her, because it’s what makes her pay attention.) Unlike her mother, when she starts to walk away it follows her, although the unhurried pace is the same. Like gravity, she thinks, the lynchpin of the universe – that attitude that says _all things exist because I do_.

Despite herself, Kalique likes it. “How did it get here?” she questions an android doing maintenance work. Its features are female, insofar as androids have genres – the eyes are kind.

The android pauses and looks at the cat. Kalique can see the sparking blue glow coming from the gaping space between the face and the rest of the head, and it doesn’t unsettle her in the least.

“It looks to be a child of its species,” the android observes mildly. “It probably belonged to one of the engineers who built the ship, Your Grace. Perhaps the owner hoped to save its life. Shall I terminate it?”

Kalique considers. The cat stares at her, unafraid. “No,” she says. “That will not be necessary. Thank you.”

She goes to her room and allows the cat to follow her. Kalique sits on the floor next to the window (which is called that merely out of convenience – it’s not glass, and to break it would need quite a bit more than a hard knock) and pretends to ignore it while the cat explores the space under the wide floating bed. When it emerges all its fur is standing on end and it looks slightly confused and terribly indignant. It wanders close to her as if by accident, all coolly uninterested glances. Kalique doesn’t lower herself by returning them (a queen does not need a crown to be a queen, and her superiority over all living beings is unquestionable), but when it noses her bare ankle and purrs she permits it.

While the cat naps, Kalique looks at the stars which are closer to godhood than she will ever be and thinks about love. It’s likely the android’s assumption is correct. This means someone petted the cat and held the cat and fed the cat and then hid it somewhere in the ship, in the hopes that it would somehow survive. She believes this attitude is stupid. The world won’t end in a day, after all – life doesn’t need Nectar to exist, only to prolong it. Kalique’s immortality is unrelated to any foreign substance and totally independent, but if she tries she gathers she can imagine the fear of death. Non-existence sounds unpleasant. (Kalique vaguely knows about the afterlife.) The ship was previously meticulously searched, to make sure no human being without Abraxas blood was in on it. The cat must have bypassed the sweep by virtue of being too small to alert any alarms.

She glances at the cat out of the corner of her eye. Love is ridiculous, she decides. The cat will still die and when it does its body will be expulsed into outer space – placing it near the Abraxas will in no way lengthen its life. As if you could pretty up a rock by letting it bask in the smell of flowers.

* * *

Kalique paints.

She hasn’t done this in quite a while, since before her womanhood ceremony – which happened when she was twelve, and wherein she received the present that became the jewel of her heart: Cerise. Without the obligation of managing Cerise’s comings-and-goings her time is utterly free, but then again her time will be utterly free forever. (It’s the reason they’re travelling the slow way instead of creating a portal: they’re not going anywhere in particular, and there’s no hurry, no hurry at all.) The brush is unfamiliar under her fingers, but Kalique is very talented, very dedicated and bored enough that relearning a skill she barely remembers doesn’t feel like a burden.

The cat watches. Kalique wonders if cats dream. It’s likely that the information is available in the library, but she rather thinks it’s the sort of thing one merely wonders about, not researches.

At first she paints what everyone paints: sunsets, girls in summer dresses, green fields that go on forever. Balem looks at her dirty fingers at dinner and says nothing. When she tires of painting the cat again and again and again (its long naps make it an excellent subject), she wanders out of her room and stumbles into a lake. Even her blood can’t help her escape the disbelieving arch of her brow—Kalique is currently living in a ship and inside this ship there is a lake where tiny multi-coloured fish nip your toes when you dip them into the water. Her mouth wants to smile, because this is so very like Mother and her contained sadness is flooded out by joy.

“All in all,” she tells the cat without looking at it so she can pretend she is talking to herself, “a good day.”

The cat does not answer. It is a cat.

Kalique looks up. No discernible lighting source, as always, despite the bright illumination. The ceiling is painted a shade of blue that Mother calls robin’s egg (she can’t confirm or deny because she hasn’t ever seen a robin, although she is aware it is a type of bird native to Earth, which is Mother’s Cerise). The windows-that-are-not are wide and unashamed and the faraway beauty of space steals a bit of Kalique’s breath. Isn’t it funny, how something that it’s not even alive reminds Kalique that she is really very human?

It’s an acceptable subject. She paints for hours and hours. The cats wanders away, presumably to get food. The light dims and darkens. Neon bars stationed above the windows light up with an electric purple glow, and Kalique watches the purest reflection of the stars wink at her from the water. The tiny fish produce waves that makes them waver but they don’t disappear and then for some reason she’s crying, silently. She looks at her paint-stained hands and the cat is back, licking its whiskers, and Kalique thinks she might be fifteen and isn’t that strange? Shouldn’t she be negotiating her first marriage contracts by now, standing in a room filled with people whose families aren’t as powerful or as fierce or as clever as hers but close enough for her to allow them the divinity of her body?

If nobody is watching you (if nobody cares) when you cry are you really sad? If the world is the same whether you exist or not are you really alive? If Mother is only asleep then why does Kalique ache this way?

* * *

That day she skips breakfast in favour of sleeping for a few hours in her bed, which is far more comfortable than the bumpy ground. She doesn’t have a bath before lying down and when she wakes up her dark blue pillows are littered with white sand. Kalique tries to shake it off and gives up when she realises she’s only scattering it. A female sim draws her a bath, undresses her and adds smelling salts to the water – the scent is not unlike honeyed milk. Kalique lifts her leg, watches her toes peek out like small sister islands. There’s something strange in tears, she thinks. It’s like poisoned blood coming out of a clumsily-healed wound. Closes her eyes and sinks, slow and languorous – this feeling, like a deep river cleaning a sorrow so dense it’s almost part of herself… it must be relief. Kalique is grieving. She thinks: grief, noun – the anchor of missing love.

A rasping voice says, low, “Kalique.”

Kalique swallows her gasp and raises her head. Balem looks at her with the mournful eyes of an icon, dressed in a high-collared tunic that only leaves his face and hands bare. She sounds perfectly even when she says, “Balem.”

“You have missed two meals,” he says. The solemnity of his mouth and the freckled skin make an odd contrast, like watching an old woman rock a baby – like witnessing a birth and a funeral the same day. “I was… concerned. Are you ill?”

The cat slips into the room and sits in front of Balem. It stares at him, tail swaying back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Balem stares back, dispassionate. Kalique isn’t fooled. Underneath that veneer of sophisticated distance he glows white-hot with a wanting just like her own. It’s in their genes, and there is no solace. (Do you think the devil lets you have breaks in between all the burning?)

“I’m not ill,” she says. It comes out too loud. When she sits up warm water runs down her bare collarbones, trails towards the valley between her breasts.

Balem’s gaze dips.

“I’m not ill,” she says again, quieter. “I’m not, I was just – distracted.”

She tries to guess what he’s feeling – he certainly doesn’t look concerned. Perhaps he’s bothered she’s broken their routine? Perhaps he enjoys the sight of her lashes, long like a bird of prey’s open wing – long like Mother’s. Perhaps he can’t bear to see any more of the world broken, and those broken pieces shattered and ground into dust. There are so few constants in their lives, now, even the slightest deviation hurts like a toothache.

“I see,” Balem says. She can’t tell if he disapproves, if he even – cares. He must, mustn’t he? He’s here in her bathroom, at the edge of her bathtub. His pupils glitter like dark jewels. Kalique feels weak, and doesn’t even know what’s disarming her. “In that case, I apologise for disturbing you.”

Kalique starts to say something. But he leaves, and not even the cat looks at her.

* * *

Kalique dreams, and in her dreams she’s happy. This is how she knows that awake she is sad.

They’re not even memories, that’s the worst. She can’t bear to think about Mother, not her face or her kindness, nothing longer than the brief touch of her hands in Kalique’s hair, braiding oh-so-carefully, so intently. The problem with being a god (in a world where you’ve got definite proof nobody will come to save you at the end) is that people don’t think about you. They might think they do but really they ponder their worship and repeat your name and make it theirs and in the end they wear you like a particularly lovely dress that is still throbbing with life and wanting and Kalique is fourteen (fifteen?), fourteen where it counts (inside), and she’s lean with hunger so she tells herself the stories again and again and again:

Think about a girl, asleep.

Everyone sleeps, everywhere. Sometimes they even do it together—sometimes they share dreams—sometimes they hold hands and breathe close to exchange exhalations heavy with the silver mist of longing (which is mostly what human beings are made of). Kalique dreams about a girl who sleeps alone, barefoot, dressed in a glittering gown like a sunbeam made silk, jewels gleaming in the hollow of her throat like dew inside a flower, gems around her limp wrists and in her gold-spun hair. More treasure than girl, almost. And there comes a prince who falls in love or falls in lust or whatever they call it in fairy tales and he sinks into her like thunder breaking apart an evergreen tree. Her mouth goes bruised like a peach. Her legs bloom open. The paleness of her thighs, interrupted by finger marks like footsteps in the sand.

Here’s the problem: no wave comes to erase the passage of love (except you wouldn’t call it love if you knew what it was really about). The sleeping girl grows fat with child and she doesn’t wake up to a first kiss – instead she opens her eyes to the pain of being split open, the way earthquakes shake apart the earth. A hundred years of sleep, which is nothing if you know anything at all about time, and then she bleeds.

Kalique thinks about the prince, and falls in and out of love with him the way one loves bright sharp things. She thinks about someone trying to profane her body and in her dreams there is blood (and it isn’t hers), thinks about cracking him open like fruit and leaning down to suck all the wet mess, about reaching between bone-white ribs and plucking his heart like a plum and eating it. She thinks about Mother asleep and Kalique goes crazy with wanting – she can imagine it vividly: kissing her hello and receiving nothing but even breaths that remain unmoved by her presence. She can almost understand. In her dreams the high, high tower and the stasis room confuse each other and she can’t ever quite see the sleeping girl’s face – it remains in shadow – but she knows those ankles. Kneels at the side of the bed and noses the familiar thighs. Touches the girl’s face and her hand comes away stained with blue lipstick like grief or like violence and it makes her—it makes her—she comes in her dreams and her toes curl.

Kalique thinks about the prince and his desperation for beauty that cannot be conquered, a heart that cannot be eaten. Thinks: _if it hurt at least I’d know she felt it_.

Opens her eyes in the dark, and doesn’t look at the stars. It isn’t the sort of thought she wants to share with anything above herself.

* * *

In the morning the silence is deafening. Kalique doesn’t get out of bed.

The cat gives her company – it purrs like a tiny engine, curled up against the back of her knees. Once in a while it licks her, whiskers tickling her skin. Kalique buries her head under a pillow and closes her eyes and tries to think about anything except—except the hot spot between her legs, which is still slick. She tells herself: it’s not like that. I’m not like that. Mother never – Mother never even… She was going to get married, she thinks. She was going to negotiate a marriage contract and get married and fuck her husband into the mattress, she was going to have a child that she would love and teach and protect – a child of the blood which meant her baby would be precious. Cerise. She misses Cerise, the beautiful gardens, the sun on her face, the low murmur of voices like worshippers praying in a temple.

She sleeps and dreams about it, a pink-lit sunset, lilac clouds and a pale sun, the smell of humid earth under her bare feet, flowers blooming with an intensity that is almost savage, eating fruit so ripe it bursts apart in her hands when she grabs it. Wakes up, drinks water, and pets the cat – behind her eyelids the image is crystal-clear, beloved like nothing else.

“I have to do something,” she whispers to the cat. “I can’t give up.”

It purrs, tilting its head to give her better access, arching into the palm of her hand. Kalique mouth goes soft with the first smile in what seems like forever.

* * *

Anyone else, and their voice would have been shaking. As it is Kalique raises her eyes when they’re done with the soup and asks – her tone lacks the distant pleasantry that she usually wears like a veil – not unkindly, “Do you ever visit Mother?”

Balem goes still, bone-deep still. She imagines she can see under his skin and even his heart slows. A millennium, she thinks, a millennium with Mother all for him, and knows jealousy for the first time. She takes a deep breath – and notices Titus watching her. He is almost the complete opposite of Balem despite them knowing each other as little as she knows them; his instinctive response to possible pain is a restlessness that reddens his mouth and a wary watchfulness badly hidden in his furrowed brow.

Kalique thinks about giving up, about playing this off as their usual idle chatter, and then she remembers the silence and the days that confound themselves with night because there is little to set them apart except a sleep in which she hungers for what she can’t have. Repeats to herself: _I have to do something. I have to. I have to._

“In the stasis room, I mean,” she continues, flawlessly casual. But her eyes are warm, and then – she speaks honestly when she says: “Because I do. And I want to talk about it.”

Balem releases the breath he’s been holding all at once. It makes him shudder like a stubborn leaf in the midst of autumn.

Kalique says: “I love her.”

Titus doesn’t cry – not even for his sister, apparently – but his eyes fill with tears and Kalique feels a jolt when she recognises the stubborn tilt of his mouth. What’s easier than loving yourself? She swallows once.

“She, she used to tell me stories,” she tells them. Her mouth is dry, and her eyes are fixed on her empty bowl. “She said they were from Earth, from her childhood – the one she remembered… She said,” inhales – it sounds like someone about to cry, she thinks, and that can’t be true can it? “She said if I ever wanted to share them with a person I loved, I’d—I’d—”

“You’d only have to turn them around,” Balem says. Kalique’s gaze jerks up. His mournful demeanour deepens so much that Kalique worries he will be the first one to cry and then she will follow and Titus won’t have a good example on how an Abraxas should behave at all. (Crying at the dinner table is gauche.) And then it doesn’t matter at all because he seems to regret deeply having said a word at all, gets up and leaves. His cloak crawls behind him like a hungry snake, and in the aftermath the silence threatens to eat Kalique whole—

“I like The Little Mermaid,” Titus says, quiet. She tries to remember the last time he talked and can’t – that realisation tastes like fear, and surprise.

Kalique tries to swallow the piece of glass caught in her throat. “I like Sleeping Beauty,” she says, and they go from there.

They sit at the feet of her bed, backs turned to her so they won’t kneel like supplicants begging for a miracle that will not happen, and Kalique embraces Titus because he is quite probably six years old and nobody has held his hand in a year and why can’t you look past your own sadness to see if it matches someone else’s? Why does loneliness make you blind and deaf and dumb? He shakes in her arms and she feels awful, a knot of guilt pulling her insides tight and hot – wishes Balem was here, sitting close to her. They could share grief like a cake.

She says: “Once upon a time,” and Titus rests his head against her breast. If she closes her eyes she can imagine that this is her child and that she’s got the hips to prove it but in this room there is no imagining anything. You think people dream in heaven, when everything they want is right there? “Once upon a time there was a girl who lived deep under the sea and she wove her hair with pearls and her teeth were sharp like blades, the better to crack open gleaming white shells. But she was curious, and she liked to watch humans, even though they died quickly and they sometimes killed for sport – her family told her not to, because they came from a world where blood’s all you’ve got when the night comes (and it’s always night time). She didn’t listen – she was curious and worse, she was wild. She saved a human’s life and rested her ear against his chest and thought: _this belongs to me_ , so she split herself in two and shed her underwater skin the way women have been taking off their dresses for years and years; like she was disarming herself, coming home from war.”

Inhale –

“And every step was a battle. Before she danced for him nobody had ever known true pain, she thought. Her bones were knives that sank straight into the earth and she had to keep running to chase that man she’d saved, that man with the heart that belonged to her. She cut her lovely hair and dropped all her pearls and smiled only with her mouth closed so she wouldn’t bare her dangerous teeth. She made herself small and quiet and dreamy, held in all her pain and showed him only beauty, and then he met someone else – a woman with eyes like burning and all her passions hanging from her neck like jewels – and they went off into the sunset…”

“And she opened her mouth,” says Titus, voice high, wet against her shoulder – Kalique stays still and doesn’t look at him and if she doesn’t look then she can’t tell he’s crying. Her heart goes: _Mother. Mother, my love, my sister, my mate, my would-be lover – I miss you so, so terribly_.

“She opened her mouth,” she agrees, “and let out a scream that shook the heavens, ran into the water where she had once been happy and her lovely pale skin, small and sheer thing that it was, cracked like a salt statue. She turned into foam in despair and that’s why – that’s why when the waves touch the beach they’re filled with foam. There’s a wanting in us that won’t be silenced. If you loved me,” she asks, “how would you tell the story?”

Titus says: “Once upon a time,” and his small hand rests against her throat, “a girl rose from the sea and met a prince who taught her to be true to herself. That’s how she realised he wasn’t what she wanted, so – so she went home, back into the water –” How can you sound so sad, Kalique thinks, _this is blood of my blood_ , how can he sound so sad and still be so quiet in her arms? Five years with Mother is nothing, nothing at all. “And there she met her family, who – who loved her so much they took care of her always—Kalique, _why won’t she wake up_?”

The most terrible question in the universe.

Kalique cries. All her wishes spill like coins. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I miss her too. I love her, and I don’t know why she won’t wake up.”


End file.
